Green with envy: Why power debugging is changing the way we develop code

As time passes, consumers demand more from their mobile devices in terms of content and functionality, and this demand has eroded the ability of battery technology to keep up with our insatiable appetite for capability. The notion of software power debugging is assisting the development engineer to create more ecologically sound devices based on the ability to see how much power is consumed by the device and correlating this to the source code. By doing statistical profiling of the code with respect to power, an engineer has the ability to understand the impact of their design decisions on the mobile devices that they create. Armed with this information, the engineer will be able to make more informed decisions about how the code is structured to both maximize battery life and minimize the impact on our planet’s natural resources.

Anyone who has a modern smartphone can attest to their love/hate relationship to it – they love the productivity boost it can provide, the use of GPS functionality to help us find our destination and the ability to be connected to all aspects of their lives, be it via text messaging, e-mail or social networking. But all of this functionality comes at a great cost – it is highly susceptible to the capacity of the battery and can even have a deleterious impact on the life of the battery as the battery can only withstand a certain number of charge cycles. There are two ways that this problem can be approached: either increase the energy density of the battery so that it can hold a greater mAh rating for the same size and weight or to pay special attention to eliminating extraneous power usage wherever possible. The problem with the former is that advances in energy storage technology have been far outstripped by the power requirements of the devices they serve. Thus, we are left with the choice of minimizing the amount of power consumed by the device.

Efforts to reduce the power footprint of a device have been mostly ad-hoc or out of the control of the device’s development engineers, e.g. improvements in wafer technology give the ability to space transistors closer together to cut down on power consumption via reduced capacitances. However, power debugging gives a modern development engineer the ability to see how their code decisions impact the overall power consumption of the system by tying the measurements of power being supplied to the system with the program counter of the microcontroller. Power debugging can give you the ability to see potential problems before you go to manufacturing of production hardware. For example, you may have a peripheral that the engineer thought was deactivated in their code, but in reality is still active and consuming power. By looking at the power graph, the engineer has the contextual clue that the power consumption of the device is more than it should be and warrants an inspection of the devices that are active in the system that are consuming energy.

Another example of how power debugging can assist an engineer is by looking at the duty cycles of their microcontroller. A common design paradigm in battery-powered electronics is to wake up from some sort of power-saving sleep mode, do the processing required and then return to the hibernation state. This is relatively simple to code, but the engineer may not be aware that there is an external stimulus causing the microcontroller to rouse from the sleep mode prematurely and thus causing the power consumption to be higher than it should. It is also possible that an external signal is occurring more often than was planned in the original design specification. While this case can be traced with a very judicious use of breakpoints, the problem may persist for quite some time before the behavior is noticed. A timeline view of the power consumption can foreshorten this latent defect because it can evince these spikes in current and allow the engineer to double-click the spike to see where in the code the microcontroller was executing when the spike occurred, thus providing the engineer with the information necessary to divine what is happening to cause the power requirements to be so high.

Power debugging can also provide statistical information about the power profile of a particular combination of application and board. This can be used in baselining the power consumption in such a way that if the engineer adds or changes a section of code in the application and then sees the power differ drastically from the baseline, then the engineer knows that something in the code section they just added or modified caused the spike and can investigate further what is happening and how to mitigate it. Moreover, an engineer can change microcontroller devices to see if the power consumption of one device is lower or higher than that of another device, thus giving a commensurate comparison between the two devices. This allows the engineer to make very scrupulous decisions about how their system is constructed with respect to power consumption.

It is evident that our consumer society will begin to rely increasingly on mobile devices which will precipitate demand for more capability and – correspondingly – more power from the batteries which drive these devices. It behooves an engineer to make their design last as long as possible on a single battery charge, so particular attention must be paid to how the design is constructed – both in hardware and software – to maximize the efficiency of the device. Power debugging gives the engineer the tools necessary to achieve that goal of making a more ecologically-friendly device that makes every electron count.

One Response to “Green with envy: Why power debugging is changing the way we develop code”

I would bet power consumed by a microcontroller amounts to a small fraction of system power. So engineers also must consider how to save power in other portions of their system while they decrease power use by the MCU. That means choosing external devices, from digital buffers to analog front ends. Unfortunately–at least for now–it proves more difficult to control power use in those off-MCU devices than in an MCU on its own. Take a careful look at ALL the ways you can reduce power, not just the MCU. You might use a low-power proximity detector–capacitive or IR–for example, to determine whether a system needs to backlight and drive an LCD. If you use wireless communications, find a low-power transceiver with a simple protocol.